Links for 2006-10-09

The New BBC One idents launched yesterday I was going to link through to the BBC’s own page on them, but it’s in a pop-up and it’s all nasty Real stuff and I couldn’t easily get it to work so I just went to YouTube instead. Flash video’s quite nice.

5 replies on “Links for 2006-10-09”

We hates them, precious. (We quite likes the old BBC2 idents, mind you.) I don’t see much more than a look-at-me statement from the agency and the directors. Thematically it’s a weird and incoherent collection. The motorcyclists (which I quite like) and the surfers are “ordinary people genuinely doing extraordinary things, with a circle motif”, but most of the rest are “ordinary people doing ordinary things, digitally tweaked to incorporate a circle motif which wasn’t there really”. Then there’s one “ordinary people apparently doing something bizarre and impossible” (the fishermen – which in itself I quite like, but it seems to have sneaked in from somewhere else entirely) and one “dancing hippos, kind of like Fantasia only these are real hippos, only actually they’re not real at all, they’re CGI, so, er.” Are people doing loads of acid these days?
Bring back the balloon, I say.

Initially I thought they were far too long; they seem to take ages to get going, and the presentation team doing the voiceovers don’t seem too sure about when they should start their waffle — er, I mean, incisive and incredibly useful talk about what’s coming up.
Then I realised that they may be deliberately longer than previous idents, so that they’re more PVR friendly — once we recognise these views, they become our cues to stop the 30x fast forwarding, and the length helps us avoid missing the start of programmes.
If that’s the case, then they’re already more effective for me than Five’s idents, which are similar in style, or ITV1’s, which are mercifully short but always mean that I have to rewind the first few seconds of a show.